Fad Diets: Craziest Claims, Common Criticisms
Be Wary Of Fad Diets: If They Sound Too Good To Be True, They Might Be
But there's nothing magical about fad diets. Be it Cabbage Soup, Grapefruit, the Rotation Diet, or The 5 Day Miracle Diet, each diet's "secret" involves significant and drastic reductions in calories.
It doesn't matter if you're drinking gallons of grapefruit juice or slurping down cauldron-sized bowls of cabbage soup. Registered dietician Cindy Cox says fad diets cut way back on calories and that's why you lose weight.
And since fad diets do nothing to change long-term eating habits, Dr. C. W. Callaway of the Mayo Clinic says most fad dieters gain back more weight than they lost, as soon as they go back to their old ways of eating.
In fact, current research shows that most low-calorie fad diets actually do more harm than good. According to Dr. Callaway, drastically reducing calories results in a decreased metabolism rate. For most women, a diet containing less then 1200 calories is classified as starvation. And as a result, the body compensates by slowing down metabolism to conserve all available energy.
After just two weeks on a fad diet, metabolism may drop by as much as 20 percent, causing a person's metabolic set point to be set permanently lower. This makes future weight loss much more difficult.
When the University of Pennsylvania put a group of lab rats on a restrictive diet, it took an average of 21 days for the group to go from obese to normal weight. It took these rats 46 days to regain their former weight. After trying the same restrictive diet a second time, it took the same group of rats 46 days to lose the weight, but only 14 days to regain it.
A Swedish study found that after only one crash diet, a group of obese rats could function normally on one-fifth the calories that regular-sized rats required.
According to Sharon Harrison, RD, fad diets are designed to offer a quick fix, a fast but temporary meltdown, by ignoring the principles of proper nutrition and healthy eating.
Consider the Cabbage Soup diet. Nutritionists call it a fad that sheds water, not fat. According to Xavier Pi-Sunyer, M.D., director of The Obesity Research Center at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, cabbage contains no magical fat-burning powers. "But," he says, "the soup does fill you up, acting as an appetite suppressant."
Some dieters complain of gas, nausea, and lightheadedness after a few days of following the Cabbage Soup regimen. The "magic" of this diet centers around a soup made from one head of cabbage, six large onions, two green peppers, one 28-ounce can of tomatoes, one bunch of celery, one packet of onion soup mix, and water.
Dieters can eat all the soup they want, and on certain days are allowed small portions of fruit, brown rice and potatoes. After seven days on Cabbage Soup, dieters are told to expect a weight loss of up to ten pounds.
"There's no magic to it," says nutritionist Katherine Tallmadge. "People on the diet are basically starving themselves and filling themselves with watery vegetables. They can't help but lose a lot of water weight. They're doing a modified fast."
Another fad is the Rotation Diet. Dieters are allowed 600 calories a day for three days, 900 calories a day for the next four days, then up to 1,200 calories for a week. After that, the cycle begins again (600+900+1200) until you reach your desired weight.
Martin Katahn, Ph.D., is the author of The Rotation Diet. As an overweight man, he spent years failing every diet he tried. So he invented his own.
What makes the Rotation Diet so special? According to Katahn, his way of reducing and increasing calories again and again in cycles, prevents the body's metabolism from slowing down, thus eliminating the fad dieting whammy of a lower metabolic set point.
The Grapefruit Diet, originally called the Hollywood Diet, started in the 1930s and has resurfaced many times since. Dieters on this diet are permitted a few vegetables, tiny amounts of protein and lots of grapefruit. Proponents of the Grapefruit Diet believe that grapefruit contains a special fat-burning enzyme.
"That's ridiculous. Grapefruit does nothing to actively burn up fat," says Cindy Cox. "The reason the Grapefruit Diet works is because dieters limit their caloric intake to less than 900 calories a day."
Joanne Larson, MS, RD agrees. "There is no such thing as a fat burning diet. The only way to burn fat is by eating less food and/or exercising more."
Another fad diet, called The New Beverly Hills Diet, suggests that combining and separating certain foods results in thorough digestion, which, in turn, leads to weight loss. Author Judy Mazel believes you'll lose weight with The Beverly Hills Diet because your digestive system won't be able to create fatty buildups.
Corn on the cob, prunes, pineapple, iceberg lettuce, a tomato and onion salad, strawberries and baked potatoes are allowed on the first two days of this diet. On day three, you get to gorge on grapes -- just grapes. Other foods are allowed during the 35-day diet, but the choices are extremely limited. The Beverly Hills Diet is another example of a modified fast.
According to nutritionist Evelyn Tribole, "You can't pit enzymes together and cancel them out by combining them in any special order."
Like the other fad diets, weight lose with this diet results from the drastic reductions in calories.
Cutting way back on calories while eating an odd assortment of foods may seem like an appealing solution for the short-term. But using these diets for longer than a few days, or using them repeatedly, is liable to make you heavier than you were before you began them.
Be wary of fad diets. There's a reason why they sound too good to be true -- because they are.
Read On:
- From the American Heart Association: Phoney AHA Diet
- From Joanne Larson, RD: Fad Diets - Ask the Dietitian
- From the Mayo Clinic: The cabbage soup diet
- From Diet Debunker: The New Cabbage Soup Diet
